


Case #0090727: Disappearing Act

by LiquidMirrors



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Abandonment, Emotional Hurt, Horror, Insanity, M/M, Psychological Horror, Slight spoilers, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-20 16:28:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18528793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiquidMirrors/pseuds/LiquidMirrors
Summary: Statement of Aidan Shipley, regarding the aftermath of an extremely strenuous breakup. Transcript copy and analysis by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.





	Case #0090727: Disappearing Act

** Case #0090727 ** \- ~~“Disappearing Act”~~

  * Statement of Aidan Shipley, regarding the aftermath of an extremely strenuous breakup. Original transcript received via email July 27th, 2009. Transcript copy and analysis by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.



 

STATEMENT BEGINS

 

The first thing I'd like to get on record is that Kyle Masonet is a good person. My… whatever the fuck is happening… he didn't do it. I'm not here to spite him, I'm not here to slander him, and I don't want any of you goddamned research geeks going around asking people about our personal lives. I also don't want any of you seeing Kyle to ask him about my “problem.” Knowing him, he'll blame himself and his dumb spooky shit, and it will only drag him back down to a place I never want him to be in ever again.

If I find out that any of you went to him, I'll bring something scarier than a “statement.”

I guess I need to start somewhere.

I left Kyle over a year ago because I wasn't able to give him what he gave me. When we started talking, we both fell fast, and because of that, he spilled everything. Within a week, I knew almost all there was to know about him; he handed his thoughts and stories to me on a silver platter. Kyle trusted me, so he decided to open himself up like a book, and I read that book religiously.

I, on the other hand, was reluctant to open up in the same way. Back then, I had felt used and wrong because I was jumping from person to person with no point in sight. My home life hadn't helped my confidence either. The foster system really screws you over sometimes.

Depressed, worn out, and with my self-confidence diving through the floor, I had lied about aspects of my personal life, including my less-than-sparkling past. He eventually found out, because of course he did. Google is a bitch, isn't it? To make a long story short, there were tears on both ends, and instead of coming clean, I ran.

Kyle gave me every chance in the world to change, but I ran away. When he confronted me, I walked out into town for hours, no goal in sight. When I cleared my head, I got home, packed everything, and started driving across the country. I know it sounds dramatic, but the… fight? It was the straw that broke the camel's back. I didn't even cry. The little voice in the back of my head just told me to leave, to get out of there.

We'd lived on the eastern coast for most of our lives, but I ended up heading towards the Midwest for god-knows-what. I settled down in a small town after a few months, got a job, and stopped thinking about what I had left behind. I locked it all away, getting rid of almost everything that reminded me of the “old Aidan.” I deleted almost every picture of Kyle off my phone, wiped out every text message, and even changed numbers for the hell of it. Social media vanished and I put every card, gift, and trinket we'd valued into a shoebox that I hid in the back of my closet. Where I was, Kyle Masonet didn't exist, and I was keen to forget about him and how I… abandoned him. I know it's heartless, but it was the only way I could've continued my life. I didn't want to see another broken heart to sit on my mountain of failures. Of course, he was still there. I just didn't want to see him.

Listen, I never claimed to be a good man.

When the dreams started around 10 months in, I naively brushed them off as stress. I was dealing with about 3 clients at once and they all needed me as a mover while they settled into their new houses. Chalking it up to a heavy workload was easy, and it brushed it under the rug of normality.

The first dream started with Kyle lying in my old bed. His back was turned to me and I could see his shoulders quivering under the threadbare sheets. I realized that he was crying, attempting to stifle his tears by pressing bits of a blanket to his face. The tears didn't stop, though, only muffling his voice and his pain. In turn, the emotional block I put up around myself crumbled, and I found myself falling to my knees and sobbing, reaching for Kyle to tell him that I was here to make everything better.

I always used to tell him those sort of things when he was distressed.

I grabbed the sheets in one hand, trying to pull them away in order to get my ex's attention. To my dismay, they wouldn't budge. Though they looked loose, it hit me that they were wound tightly around him, almost as taut as cords. I pulled and pulled, but nothing moved.

I heard Kyle go quiet, and he croaked out my name through the tears. I must've responded through my own hysteria, but I still can't remember what I said. He started turning his head towards me when I woke up, unable to comprehend what I had just seen.

I don't really remember that day's work. All I recall is driving to a client's house, moving a wardrobe down her hall, and then going back home. I wasn't in the right state to focus on arranging boxes. Since the emotional wall had crumbled, all the things that I had locked away started hitting me full force. I felt hollowed out and nothing seemed to pierce through the haze that surrounded me. The last clear thing that remember from that specific day was lying down on the couch and watching some nature documentary that was rolling on the T.V. I just stared at the screen, not really feeling anything at all.

I don't recall falling asleep that night, but I can easily tell you about the next dream. It was the same at first; Kyle, the bed, and our sobs mixing together. He started turning his head towards me again, but this time I was able to focus on something… weird. Staring up at me was his face, tear-streaked and puffy from crying for so long. After a moment, though, I felt a jab of pain in the back of my head. Through my shock, I saw Kyle's face vanish. Nothing. There was _nothing_ where his face should've been. The sobbing wasn't muffled because of the blanket or the sheets; it was muffled because he didn't even have a damn mouth to cry through.

I stumbled back, falling on my ass as I tried crawling backwards towards the door. I was screaming, begging Kyle to stop, that I was so, so sorry for what I did. I got a few meters away before he started crawling out of the bed onto the floor. God, I can barely describe how it moved. Imagine a contortionist from one of those old-timey sideshows, except with too many joints and bones that bend like popsicle sticks. Couple that with the sounds that it kept making. Among the clicking of stiff joints and the shuffling of its hands and feet along the floor, the Kyle-thing kept trying to speak. I couldn't tell what it was saying, but I could understand perfectly that it _wanted_ me. Whatever that thing was, it wasn't Kyle anymore, and it wanted me back to pay whatever debt I had taken with me.

Of course, I woke up screaming.

I ran to the bathroom to vomit, but I was only able to dry heave for a handful of minutes.

I planned on staying home after that. I called my client (this woman in her late 40s. Brianne was her name, I think), and told her about having to throw in the towel because of a “surprise fever.” She seemed a little bewildered about why I was calling her, and asked why I contacted her after I had finished the job.

“What do you mean, ‘finished the job’?” I asked. “I only moved the dresser to the bedroom yesterday. I still have the boxes, the couch, the...the…” I trailed off as Brianne explained that I had completed all of her requests only three days ago. When I nervously asked her about when I had shoved the dresser down the hall, she replied that I did that almost a week back. I hung up before she could keep talking.

What can I tell you? I practically shit myself. I was missing time, but from my perspective, I had only been asleep for a single night. When I searched my grimy townhouse for any differences, I was hit with the reality that everything had shifted. My clothes were strewn around haphazardly, beer bottles smashed against the floor, and dirty dishes seemingly hidden in cabinets and under chairs. Someone had been in my house while I was out of commission.

That was my cue to barricade myself in my home. The escalation was too fast, the bullshit hitting me the same way an oncoming train obliterates everything in its path. It kept ramping up from there. In my dreams, the distance between me and the Kyle-thing would grow farther and farther away, and it would scream louder and louder, trying to climb up walls and through the ever-extending hallway. When I was awake, I was in a constant state of confusion, thoughts clicking and chattering together in a cacophony of concepts. I started losing even more and more time, with episodes sometimes occurring multiple times a day. The hands of the clock jumped around constantly, leaving me without a grasp of time. Once, I even sat in front of my bedside clock to make sure it wasn’t failing. I swear to you that I watched the fucker speed through hours as if it was a timelapse video. I wandered around my home in a daze, not being able to sit still in any one room. If I stayed in a single place for too long, I’d hear the skittering of the creature crawling around on the floor or walls. It would start moaning and pleading for me to “come down the hallway,” and that if I did, it would “make everything happy again, like it used to.” On worse nights, I’d catch it sifting through my things in various rooms, its faceless head pressing against shirts or books or stained dishes. I was barely functioning, and I stopped sleeping out of desperation because I didn’t want it to catch me in my dreams. It got to a point where whenever I stared at the wood grain of my dirty floor, I could see the strands of wood slowly swim and shift against each other like the threads in a tapestry.

For some reason, all of the bullshit let back after who-knows-how-long. One random day, the walls wound back into their proper place, and the windows snapped back into their frames. I needed to do something about whatever the hell was happening, so I ran out the house towards the local library. There, I found out that I was stuck in that hell for over three months. When I started looking up paranormal crap, I was led down the rabbit hole to your site. I talked to one of your correspondents for a little while before they "implored" me to send in a statement.

All I have left to say is that if this... whatever this thing is... if it takes me, I’ll die trying to kill it before it kills me. I want to try running again, but I feel like this is happening because I ran away in the first place. I don’t know if it will follow me into the next town, but it certainly feels hell-bent on screwing with me. I can’t tell if I am more afraid or more angry that it keeps toying with my head.

If it does get me in the end, then I hope I’ll go without notice.

There is nobody left who will remember me.

 

STATEMENT ENDS

 

I must say that this case was one of our more difficult in terms of investigation. Given that the incidents described presumably take place in the United States, an intern was sent overseas to comb through evidence surrounding the relationship between Mr Shipley and Mr Masonet. According to what they returned with, there are only three documents including the name “Aidan Shipley,” which entailed a high school disciplinary record from 1998, a document regarding the status of one of Shipley’s foster homes, and the final record being a single missing persons poster found in the small town of Norton, Kansas. The date on the poster was listed as approximately three weeks after Mr Shipley delivered his statement to us.

The fact that we even found these documents feels intentional. I get a sense that when the Spiral took Aidan Shipley, it wanted to leave something behind in order to mock him. Shipley attempted to disappear from his old life, and he eventually did.

As to the status of Kyle Masonet, our intern had discovered that he was living a peaceful, yet willfully ignorant life in eastern Maryland. We were not inclined to question him about the events told to us, but what our intern did glean from a brief conversation was that Mr Masonet was known to have frequent nightmares that, as he stated, “never made sense.” When asked to elaborate, Masonet explained his thoughts with words such as “non-euclidean geometry” and “Schrödinger’s people.” Kyle also included that these bizarre nightmares intrigued him, prompting him to take up an interest in horror and supernatural media.

While I believe that Mr Masonet may have been touched by the Spiral, thus kickstarting the events of this record, I do not believe that Kyle directly participated in Aidan Shipley’s erasure. All-in-all, he’s just another poor soul recovering from a broken heart. I would keep an eye out for him, though, in case more stories pop up about missing lovers.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write a fanstatement for a very long time, but I genuinely didn't know how to tackle it. It's amateur-ish, but it was genuinely fun to figure out and "get down on paper". Couldn't stop spinning, honestly. I wanted to get something down about how that grief can eat away at a person, especially if they've buried it deep down for so long. All that emotional weight resurfaces eventually, right? 
> 
> I hope that if I continue writing more and more, eventually I'll be able to put some cleaned-up and polished horror stories under my belt!


End file.
